


What Kept You So Long?

by ninemoons42



Category: Inception (2010), Låt den rätte komma in | Let the Right One In (2008)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - High School, Bullying, F/M, Familial Abuse, M/M, Supernatural Elements, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-10
Updated: 2011-04-10
Packaged: 2017-10-17 21:37:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of them is being bullied and abused; one of them is a centuries-old vampire. They meet in the dead of winter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Kept You So Long?

**Author's Note:**

> title: What Kept You So Long?   
> author: ninemoons42  
> pairings: Mal/Dom, eventual Arthur/Eames. other characters include Maurice Fischer, Robert Fischer, Saito, Yusuf, Ariadne.  
> warnings: Finally posted in one completed part: my _Inception_ / _Låt den rätte komma in [Let the Right One In]_ AU story. So be warned for: vampires, blood, domestic and familial abuse, bullying, Eames being slightly antisocial/showing sociopathic tendencies, Arthur as a vampire-type, and general bleakness in the setting and in the tone of the story. There will be hurt/comfort in this one, of course, and lots of teenaged angst.   
>  Title and cut-text taken from "Let the Right One Slip In" by Morrissey.  
> disclaimer: I don't own the original stories, series, or characters. Not making any profit, just playing in the sandbox.

They are, to all appearances, a small family, fleeing the city.

The man, guiding his wife solicitously through the train carriage. He has eyes the color of the summer sky, and they are deep and warm and shaded with worries and smiles.

The woman, smiling beatifically at her husband as she walks carefully, balancing on the heels of her shoes, crimson the color of freshly spilt blood. Dark wavy hair in a halo around her face, wild tendrils prone to getting caught in the corners of her mouth, a mouth made for emotions.

The boy.

Solemn and pale and skinny, dressed as primly as his father if not more so, in his own suit. Unrelieved black. His hair is longer than the woman’s, falling past his shoulders, the curls at the sides gelled neatly back.

The silver-haired conductor nods politely as they settle into their chosen compartment. He inspects their tickets, watches curiously as the three surround themselves with boxes and bags and, strangely enough, a large picnic cooler. Not exactly a common sight in these days of takeaway and single-serve.

The man and the woman are huddled together on one of the benches, and the boy has the other to himself.

“We should get there in about four hours, right?” the man asks suddenly.

The conductor adjusts his glasses, peers at his pocket watch. “Or sooner, the way things are headed. This isn’t really a good night for people to travel; we’re almost in the dead of winter, after all, and the nights are getting much longer. In any case, this is the last train to that station. You’ll reach your destination by midnight at the latest.”

“Good,” the man says firmly, and he holds out their tickets for inspection. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Enjoy your trip.”

///

She pulls the curtain across the small window in the compartment’s door and leans in urgently. “Are you all right? Do you think you’ll be needing any of the emergency supplies?”

“No,” I tell her, place two fingers on her wrist. I feel the strong pulse. It sings to me – from her it’s a sweet, sad _chanson_ , the type that wrings tears from listener and singer alike – and I fight to resist its call. “Please, Mallorie. I’m fine. You gave me so much last night.”

“You looked like you needed it, Arthur,” she says.

I lie down on the bench; it’s just long enough to fit me. “Thank you.”

He puts an arm around her and aims an all-too-familiar squint at me. “Are you sure you have enough of these,” and he gestures vaguely in the direction of the picnic cooler. “You know Mal and I can try to bank more blood for you. As much as you think you might need. Just say the word, Arthur.”

“Dominick.” I say quietly, looking right at him. I look in his eyes and I sense him – his worry, his uncertainty, a boyish excitement, an old and worn-down hope. “You and Mallorie have already done enough for me. Too much. I’ll be all right for a while. There should be enough to last. And in the meantime I intend to fulfill the promise I’ve made you.”

“Which promise you did not need to make at all,” she says quietly, urgently. “We are willing to help you. To protect you. For as long as we can.”

“And you also need to be together. You need to start your lives, start your family. For that, you’ll both need to be all right. Especially you,” I say. “I will not be an obstacle to your happiness.”

Her eyes grow wistful. I know that they have been trying to conceive. I can hear them, sometimes, the muffled cries and the soft rhythmic creaking of the bed. It’s a dream of theirs.

I will oppose anyone who tries to get in the way of that dream.

Even if that obstacle turns out to be – myself.

“Mal.” Dominick sighs, draws her in close. “We agreed to an arrangement with Arthur. Let’s stick with it for now. A month, and we can all talk about it again.” He looks at me. “You’ll know where these supplies will be at all times. And you’ll know how to contact us if anything starts to go wrong.”

“I gave my word,” I tell him. “I will not be able to break that promise. And you know that.”

///

He runs.

Crashing through the flat, only enough time to throw on a worn-out denim jacket, heedless of the biting cold outside. There’s a ski cap crushed into one of the pockets.

He dashes the tears from his eyes and he’s out the door.

The silence is loud, and he covers his ears and shivers in the entryway to the apartment building.

He probes his teeth with his tongue, gingerly. One after the other. No wiggles this time, and he breathes out his relief, shaky. His breath visible in the harsh glow of the streetlights.

The cold attacks his face, and his cheeks, his mouth, are raw and red within moments.

Better this than a black eye. A slash to the arm. Broken bones.

It could have been much, much worse.

He’s still trying to forget what happened on his fifteenth birthday. Weight atop him, the terrible stench of someone who doesn’t wash, who marinates nearly constantly in a fug of illegal substances and alcohol. The sharp _crack_ of fist meeting bone, the sick joy of watching himself attempt to kick in his fallen assailant’s ribs.

He breathes, tries to calm down, and pushes off from the side of the building. Two keys slowly warming against his skin: one for the front door, one for his room. He’d had to pay a lot for someone to install that second lock on the sly.

He breathes out a small cloud of cold, jams the cap onto his head, composes himself as he walks slowly past the small playground in the yard, touches a cold hand to the frame of the swing set.

Lights in the distance. There’s a small curry shop down the block. He pushes in, to the sounds of Edith Piaf. _I regret nothing of nothing._

“Oi, we’re closing – hey, Eames,” the owner says.

“Hi, Yusuf. Need any help?”

He hates that his voice trembles a little still. He needs to toughen up. He needs to get stronger. It’s not as if the fights and the beatings are isolated incidents. It’s not as if that night won’t be repeated. They’re part of his life, have been ever since his mum died and his dad married that woman.

Mum had been quiet, and sad, but she could control Dad, with a look, with a word. Eames had been safe from him for as long as she’d been alive.

Has it only been three years? But then, the days run together in a blur of school, work, and the inevitable late-night rows.

It’s hard to sleep. He knows it sometimes makes him look a fright. Skinny. Never getting enough to eat. This is why he takes odd jobs in restaurants, washing dishes, busing tables, mopping the floor. At least the owners think nothing of paying him in food and a few bills. And he’s good at what he does, as it turns out. He thinks he can make a good fish and chips now.

As always, here in this shop, Yusuf smiles kindly at him, understandingly. “Not tonight. Too cold for people to go out and eat, I guess. But, you know, I’ve been experimenting on this new spice blend for the fish curry. Want to tell me if it’s any good?”

Eames swallows his pride – easy enough to do it when you do it every day – and says, “Sure.”

///

Eames wakes up in the morning, silently puts all his clothes back on.

It’s hard to get up, but it’s the last day of winter holidays, and he has to go back to school tomorrow.

Today should be a day of freedom for him, and all he has to do is –

“And where do you think _you’re_ going?”

Eames freezes for a long moment.

 _I didn’t know she was here._

 _I forgot to check last night._

He’d been sleepy, and full of fish curry, when he’d sneaked home: climbed up the fire escape stairs, slid in through the window, checked to make sure his door was locked. Fallen into a happy sleep, or at least a contented one. He’d been warm and fed. Snow had fallen on his shoulders, on his head, but he’d been smiling, remembering Yusuf’s bad jokes, enjoying the process of cleaning and closing up the restaurant. Preparing for tomorrow, all those succulent fish yielding to his knife as he filleted them.

His mother, and the light in her eyes when she looked down at a perfectly roasted fish.

All that pales now as he slowly turns around.

She is smaller than him. Curvy. Pouty lips. A bad dye-job that’s supposed to be strawberry-blonde but instead looks brassy orange. Scars all up and down her arms, bared even in deepest winter. Track marks.

This is the woman his father replaced his mother with.

This is the person in the world whom Eames hates the most.

She takes a drag off her cigarette, and Eames winces at the slightly stale, sweetish smell.

One of the other reasons he never likes to stay here.

His father’s a belligerent man without access to the drugs. With, he becomes a monster.

Eames lets his right hand drift into his pants pocket. Fingers close, hard, around the butterfly knife. Yet another illegal object in this house of illegal things, something else he’d had to beg, borrow, and steal for.

He’s been carrying it around since the night before his sixteenth birthday.

“Running off again,” the woman says, puffs smoke rings into the air around her. Wreathed in smoke, she should look beautiful, and she might have been, once. No longer. Not since Eames’s father.

Because surrounding the track marks, exposed by the tiny tube of a dress she’s wearing: fist-shaped bruises. The only thing that’s different is that she fights just as dirty as his father does. He’s seen them both, the morning after a big row, clutching separate ice packs: she to her head, he to his thigh.

Eames has his own first-aid kit in his room; he’s become somewhat adept at looking after himself. But it sticks in his throat like barbed wire that the second ice pack had been bought with his own hard-earned money, and now it’s being used by someone else, and he’s not been able to buy himself a replacement since.

“What’s it to you,” he grunts at her. There’s nothing for it, and the usual silent treatment only means he’s going to stay indoors longer when every instinct is screaming for him to get outdoors. Away from her. Away from the stale marijuana. _Away._

“What, I can’t ask?”

“Keep it the fuck down,” another voice bellows, and Eames clicks his mouth shut, whirls on his feet and he’s out and running downstairs before the woman can react.

He sneaks glances over his shoulder until he’s sure the apartment building is long out of sight.

Only then does Eames’s hand unfold from around the butterfly knife.

///

Mallorie and Dominick are sleeping now. It’s half past one in the morning.

Their exhaustion from the jobs they’ve just taken means deep sleep. I can do anything I want, now, really, and no one will ever have to mind, or know. I could _change_ or I could try to continue the long hours of moving things around in the apartment. Every morning when they wake up the house looks more like the home that they suddenly had to leave. I’ve nothing to do, really, and it’s a puzzle, it’s a game, to figure out the things they like, how to fit the items from a house into a tiny apartment.

But here I am at the window. My jacket on the bed.

The snow begins to fall, as it has every night since we arrived.

Guilt gnaws at me, and the tiny room closes in. Bed, table, chair. Hunger. Like a lassitude spreading in my bones, the world fading and failing. Sleep is my constant companion, sleep and hunger, the need to _take_ , and it takes all I have to fight it all back.

Underneath the bed, the picnic cooler.

I reach in and pick out another container of blood. B, the label says. Another bag of Mallorie’s blood.

I slit the container with a long talon of a thumbnail, _change_ my hand back to normal, tip my head back and pour the blood into my mouth.

Colors sharpen, the small sounds of night. I will my hair an inch or two longer. I can sense the blood rushing through my veins, neurons sparking faster inside my brain. The facsimile of a heartbeat.

They have protested, mightily, at finding me and the cooler here in the smallest room. But I have told them my reasoning: The flat has three bedrooms. The biggest one, I hope, will become a nursery. The second bedroom, the one that faces east, must be theirs. So I really have no other place to stay but here.

What I didn’t tell them was: I want to be gone, I want to be out of their lives, _gone_ , because I will not stay where there is a child.

The temptation would be far too much for me. I am good at passing for what I’m not, but I fear myself, I fear what I’ll do when a child enters their lives.

I intend to keep that vow that I made so long ago. I will deny myself.

The window glass throws back the palest of reflections at me. I can cast a shadow, I can see myself in mirrors. But the image is always off.

Movement in the courtyard, four floors down.

This side of the building is in shadow.

I slide the window open and _jump_. Landing without a sound.

The boy walks towards the buildings, towards the playground, and sits in one of the swings. He doesn’t seem to care about the snow falling. I watch him lean forward, put his head in his hands.

I adjust the knot in my tie and walk over to him.

“Hello,” I say.

He startles upright, _stares_ at me, frozen.

Threadbare shirts, yarn corkscrewing down from a rip in his sweater, worn leather gloves. His shoes, scuffed and dirty. Denim jacket stained with paint and cooking oil and curry, sweat and a stale smoke.

I look at his face. A fading bruise around his left eye. Newer bruises around his neck, around his wrists. Deep shadows in his face. His teeth are crooked. Scars like nails and fists printed into his skin. Nose broken at least twice.

He’s beautiful.

“I’m Arthur,” I say.

He suddenly shivers all over and comes to life. He smiles, tentatively, holds out a hand. “Eames.”

When I take his hand I feel warmth. My senses report, one by one. The beat of his heart, the blood in his fingertips. Broken bones badly set. Hate and fear and self-loathing rolling off him in waves, and the unmistakable musk of a boy in his late teens.

Anger flares inside me, unexpected, unexplainable. A need to claim. A need to be with him. I push it all away. Why am I angry? So what if he’s being abused?

I am not and have never been in the business of saving lives.

“You’re new,” he says.

I nod at him. “Yes. We’ve just moved in.”

He snorts quietly, and a ghost of a smile flits across his lips. “Don’t know why anyone ever comes here. Nothing happens. Boring, boring, boring. Isn’t much of a gaff, really.”

“Maybe that’s why,” I say, and I am rewarded with a real grin.

“Your parents must be _boring_ people, then.”

I need to sidestep that. I can barely remember my birth parents. I have forgotten the woman who turned me.

It’s been, what, five hundred years? Six hundred?

“What about yours?” I ask.

“Oh, _them_.” His voice goes cold. He bites off each word like it’s a shot from a gun. “Don’t mind them. If they yell in the middle of the night or start throwing things around or whatever. Happens a lot. More often than I’d like, really.”

“Really.”

The snow continues to fall, and he starts again. Inexplicably begins shrugging out of his jacket. “Hey, aren’t you _cold_ or something?”

I put a hand on his arm. The snowflakes falling onto my sleeve. Nothing melting. I wonder, for a moment, if he will notice. “I’m fine. I’m not cold. Please keep your jacket.”

“You sure?” he asks, doubtful. His eyes taking me in.

“I am sure.”

When he gets up, I follow him to the door. I wonder how I’m supposed to ask him. This is a different entrance. I can come and go as I please from the front door of the building, since that was where we came in and Mallorie and Dominick invited me in there, but....

“Well, come on in,” Eames suddenly says, and he shoulders the door open and holds it for me.

Oh.

Permission. As easy as that, then.

“Thank you,” I say.

“What floor are you guys on?” he asks, at the foot of the stairs.

“Fourth,” I tell him.

His eyes widen again. “Then you’re the new neighbors. At the end of the corridor? Wow. We’re in 432.”

“Yes,” I nod. “We’re next door, in 434.”

“That – that’s nice,” he says quietly.

I bid him good night at his door.

And I slip back into the tiny room. Draw the heavy black curtains at my small window together. Dawn is coming.

I find myself lying awake, thinking, where in the other apartment is Eames?

///

He dreams. A quiet conversation. Sitting on a park bench beside a boy in a suit. Black, black like the night. Thin pinstripes in silver-grey, seams picked out in white. The boy has long hair and looks solemn, but he sounds kind, he sounds interested.

For some reason, his mind keeps changing the tie from black to red.

He doesn’t remember what they were talking about.

He’s gone from the flat again in the morning, and he wonders if Arthur – _yes, that was his name_ – is going to transfer into his class or something, even though it’s about three weeks into the term.

 _Stop behaving like some girl’s blouse._

When he slinks into the back of the classroom he feels the teacher’s eyes go straight to him.

Normally Eames would thumb his nose at authority figures, but Saito is all right. Teaches difficult lessons, but he’s always fair. Everyone else in the class hates him. Not Eames.

Saito blinks, once, and focuses on the blackboard again. “All right. Back to _Romeo and Juliet_ today.” He can roll his Rs with the best of them, but sometimes the Ls come out slightly slurred. Asian. “Turn to pages 42 and 43 and begin working on the essay questions. You have fifteen minutes.”

Eames remembers that there is a mutated L in the Japanese language, in much the same way that the R in Chinese languages is somewhat different from the one in English.

His mother had been a renowned scholar of Oriental literature. She had wanted to send him to Japan, to be safe with her friends somewhere his father would never go.

And then she had died in his arms, his father shaking, banished to the doorway. The nurses glaring at his reek, their sympathies solidly with Eames and his mother.

Maybe this is the reason why he should hate Saito. Saito reminds him of dragons and _kimono_ and picture scrolls, _The Tale of Genji_ and _Journey to the West_ , puppets and feathers and the Great Wall of China.

Eames dashes off his answers. The cold makes his hands shake as he scribbles as fast as he can. Next class is gym. He has to be first out of the classroom. He has to get to the gym before everyone else.

But he lingers too long over the last essay question and when he looks up the last students are straggling out.

“Shit shit shit,” Eames curses as he throws all his things back into his bag, and he hustles out.

He never sees the wary look that the teacher levels at him.

Round the corner to get to the gym and he stops dead.

A shadow falls over him, and he swallows past the razor-sharp lump of apprehension in his throat.

 _Not fucking again._

Maurice Fischer. Robert Fischer. Half-brothers, they agree on nothing except that they want to crush the class under their bootheels. They’re surrounded by their usual gang.

But Eames straightens, as he has every day of this past week, and affects an unconcerned air. “Can I help you,” he drawls.

 _Danger, danger, Stuart Eames!_

He tamps down on the high, gibbering noise of fear inside his head, concentrates on meeting the brothers’ eyes.

“Asking for trouble again,” Maurice hisses. A face that only a mother could love. He’s going grey.

Eames hopes he goes bald, too. Petty, but a small victory.

Robert turns that blank grin toward him. “Let’s give him what he asked for.”

Maurice nods. “Make him run home squealing.”

“I’d like to see you try,” and Eames slowly puts down his things, drops into a defensive crouch.

Robert nods, once, sharply, and two of the other boys advance.

Eames sidesteps the first punch and just barely manages to dodge the second one.

But when the _third_ hit is a kick straight into his groin, he hates himself for the shocked whine that comes out of his mouth, and falls to his knees. Pain like a fire, licking his skin. Red starbursts behind his eyelids.

Maurice chuckles, long and low and malicious, and there’s nothing for Eames to do but curl into a ball, hands and arms protecting his head. He feels them close in on him. He thinks of women in elaborate robes with their hair falling to their feet, softly fragrant with incense and the murmuring of court gossip.

The first kicks hit along his ribs. One hard fist exploding a bruise onto his shoulder. They’re trying their level best to bash his head in.

Eames closes his eyes and the court ladies fade away as he thinks of a pale, thin boy in a black pinstriped suit.

After several more painful minutes there’s a sudden yelp. It’s not him and it makes him open his eyes, startled. Eames has been succeeding at enduring the beating without a whimper. He does have his pride.

“Oof!”

 _That was Robert!_

Carefully, Eames unwinds his arms from around his head.

There is someone standing over him, a little in front of him. Protective. Legs braced wide apart.

Eames’s eyes widen.

Black trousers. The pinstripes today are deep red.

“Arthur?” he asks, shocked.

The other boy looks over his shoulder. “Hello, Eames,” he says quietly.

“Hi.”

Eames is thunderstruck. Arthur is smaller than he is, he’d say he’s about Robert Fischer’s height.

But Robert Fischer is _kneeling_ at Arthur’s feet.

Well, the hand clamped tight and twisting his ear might have something to do with that.

Beyond the two, Maurice is slowly swelling in anger. He looks like a kettle put on for tea. All he lacks is the angry whistling.

So why isn’t he doing anything?

Eames carefully sits up, minding the pain all along his ribs and shoulders and all around his head – and receives a second shock.

 _Saito_ is standing over _Maurice_. Arms folded. Expression as hard as a rock’s.

“Are you all right, Mister Eames,” Saito suddenly says.

Eames decides against nodding. It might make his head hurt. Instead he says, “Yes, sir.”

The teacher snorts, tips him a grave nod. It is not a sound or a gesture that Eames had expected out of him. “You two get out of here. I’ve seen everything, and I’ll see to these boys.”

When Arthur releases Robert, the boy collapses into the muddied slush with a truly pathetic whimper.

Eames will think of that sound, and smile, for a very long time.

The third shock comes right after that: thin, bony Arthur simply grabs his shoulder and _lifts_ , and Eames is suddenly on his feet.

“Can you walk,” Arthur says.

“’M fine,” Eames says.

“All right.” Arthur bows, deeply, to Saito, who returns an abbreviated salute and turns away, crooking his finger. The thugs follow him, heads hanging down.

Eames looks back over his shoulder for a long time, as he and Arthur walk away from the school.

///

I wonder if Eames has noticed that I am barefoot.

I don’t even know how I _knew_ that he needed help.

I remember waking up and _needing_ to be by his side.

I am very, very lucky. The shadows lengthen before us as we walk away from the school. The sun vanishing below the horizon, green flash of light winking out. Abandoned buildings and dark windows all around us. I stretch out my senses. No one is here.

“Thank you,” Eames says.

I look at him, and then, he falls over, quiet and into himself.

They must have hit him harder than I’d thought!

“Eames. Eames!” I shout.

No response. His eyelids fluttering.

Nothing for it, then, and I carefully take off my waistcoat, my tie, my shirt. I stand bare-chested in the cold and think of _wings_.

Bones moving in my arms, my shoulders. Muscles bunching and reforming. Skin stretching out.

This should be enough.

I lift Eames, flap my wings several times, push off from the ground. Make for the apartments as fast as I can. It will not do me any good to be found out.

I land on the tiny excuse for a balcony. I bless Mallorie for having taken the precaution of inviting me in through this door. I pull in my wings as I fall into 434.

No one is home.

Dominick is a doctor. When he took me in, he started teaching me, just for fun, how to give first aid. “After all, it will help you blend in.”

I remember that Mallorie had not exactly been amused.

So I know enough to dig out the kit they keep in the bathroom. I feel along Eames’s ribs: bruised. Possibly cracked. But no breaks. His head: the same. If he has a concussion I will need to wake him up, again and again.

He is not bleeding, and for that, I am extremely grateful.

It is the work of a few minutes to make sure Eames will be all right; I bind him up. Dominick must look at my work later on. I pull some blankets from one of the boxes and put them over Eames, unconscious on my bed.

And then I shake his shoulder, and I call out to him. “Eames!”

“Mum,” he says, once, and then his eyes blink open, slowly. “Arthur?”

“I’m here,” I say. “You are safe, for now. Do you remember what happened to you?”

He thinks about that for a moment, and then he smiles. “You. And Saito. Professor.” He laughs, and then he winces. “What’d they do to me?”

They tried to kill you. “They tried to hurt you.”

“’M better th’n that, ’m hard t’kill,” Eames slurs, and he sighs, and he falls unconscious once again.

After a moment, he lets out a quiet, snuffling snore.

I give in to the smile pulling at my mouth, and settle in to wait for Dominick.

///

Eames swims, sluggish, in a vaguely upward direction. Up, through the darkness. His arms and legs feel like lead weights bearing him down. Dull echoes of pain, pain around his eyes and near his ribs, and the old-dust smell of dried and drying blood. He tastes rust and rainwater on his tongue.

Someone is calling him.

“Eames. Answer me, Eames.”

A stern and distant voice. Someone in authority. He sees a blurred image of his teacher – _Saito_ – and he remembers someone who was being forced down into the mud, and then....

“Eames.”

Hard to lift his eyelids. So heavy, so heavy.

And he panics. _Drugs? I was drugged? No! NO!_

He thrashes. Someone is holding him down. He fights.

“Get away from him, Dominick!”

 _CRACK_

Slap to the face.

Eames opens his eyes and prepares to shout.

 _I can see! I’m okay...Arthur?_

Because Arthur’s hand is still raised and now Eames feels the throb in his jaw. Blood in his mouth. He swallows thickly.

Someone is moving past Arthur, a pretty woman, her dark curls framing her face. Something in her hand, and Eames flinches and gasps when she touches his cheek. “That’s cold!”

“Sorry, _mon cher_ ,” she says, and she smiles. A wide mouth, a kind of mischief in the wink she tips at him. Crushed ice wrapped in the tea towel in her hand. Her eyes are suddenly, immensely sad. “I apologize for these ham-handed boys of mine – but he hit you, Arthur hit you, because it was _necessaire_. You were thrashing like a landed fish.”

“I’m surprised you know what that is, Mal.” The fourth person in the room is a man with blue eyes. He ignores the woman as she sticks her tongue out at him; he squints and sits down on Eames’s other side, looks him over critically – and kindly. “I’m Dominick, and this is my wife, Mallorie. Arthur alerted us to your condition when we got back here. How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been hit by a truck,” Eames tells him, honestly.

Mallorie clucks her tongue in sympathy. “Arthur told us everything. You are lucky that your teacher is such a reasonable man; I hope he sees those boys punished.”

“If he doesn’t, I’ll do it myself,” Arthur says quietly.

Eames watches Dominick and Mallorie exchange a look, and then she says, “Well. Who are you, then?”

“’M Eames,” Eames says. His eyes never leaving Arthur’s. “Stuart Eames. Live next door to you.”

“Do you, now? Well, good to meet you, Eames.” He watches as Dominick offers a hand to his wife. “Stay here while you’re still getting your bearings. If you feel dizzy, tell Arthur, and he’ll let us know. All right?”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry,” Arthur says. He is suddenly sitting next to Eames.

“You hit me,” Eames says.

Arthur’s hard and glittering eyes grow solemn. “Yes.”

Eames licks the blood from his teeth before he grins. “You hit good. And you put Robert down on his knees. ’S okay.”

Silence. Eames lists to his side, sinks back into the cushions and he realizes he’s on a couch. Floral patterns in greys and whites.

Arthur sits primly, with his hands folded in his lap. Eyes on Eames.

The overhead light seems to spark twin answers in his dark eyes.

Eames normally never looks other people in the eyes. Just a few exceptions: Yusuf. Saito. The girl in the scarf who sometimes sits on the pavement outside the off-licence, a piece of chalk that lets her play hopscotch or draw the faces of people passing by. He meets their eyes, he smiles and laughs or shows them respect.

Arthur is another matter altogether, the icy look on his face, the tight line of his mouth – and the hot flush of anger across his cheeks when he had Robert Fischer on his knees, keening in pain and useless fury. His eyebrows pulled together, the worry and the fear.

Eames reaches out, then, though every movement feels like a wildfire licking pain along his nerves, and he touches Arthur’s wrist – and he only registers the strange cold there for a brief moment before Arthur is taking his hand so carefully in both of his.

Eames falls back asleep, thinks of the blackness like Arthur’s eyes, and he dives in eagerly.

///

I could stay here, unmoving, and let Eames sleep – it’s a healing sleep, it’s a good sleep – but dimly I remember what it’s like to fall asleep in an unnatural position, to wake up cramped and uncomfortable.

I rearrange him on the couch. Feet up at one end, shoes off. His socks have holes in them.

I look down at my hands when they arrange his arms unconsciously, crossed at the wrist on his chest – and then Eames sighs and throws one of his arms over his eyes. The other arm dangles off the couch.

I sit down on the floor and arrange myself so his free hand is on my shoulder.

It’s been a long, long time since I wanted someone to touch me.

I wonder how long it will take him to realize that I am cold. That I am...what I am.

I need to feed, the day’s events have worn me out – but I ignore the hunger and I stay there, with Eames’s hand on my shoulder, and I think about the things I’ve forgotten.

Sunlight on my shoulders. Water, the current of the river flowing near a small house. Tart, tiny apples and the bitter stone in the heart of a cherry. Women singing songs that were always both sad and sweet.

One woman in particular, long black hair, eyes the blue of a summer’s sky. Tears in her eyes, her hand outstretched, and not a sound coming from her mouth.

“Arthur?”

I open my eyes. I feel weak.

Mallorie is on her knees next to me. A bag of Dominick’s blood in her hand.

“Thank you.” I take the bag, rip it open with my teeth. Sweet-stale-dust, washing onto my tongue. The memories fade.

I’m here. In the present.

Eames’s hand has slipped off my shoulder, and I absently put it back as I finish the bag and look at Mallorie. Smell of meat and vegetables coming from the kitchen. Mallorie has been sneaking brandied cherries from the cabinet again. Dominick is on the telephone, talking about today's clinic rounds.

“He’s quite some boy, isn’t he.” Mallorie is looking at Eames's hand, at his mouth. She is smiling. “ _Un petit difficile_ to think about him and the situation you described to us.”

How succinct the language has become, how compact and strangely unfeeling. Eames is being abused. And all it takes is that word, and all kinds of reactions follow: pity, fear, disgust, sorrow.

Eames may be carrying a knife in his pockets, may have scarred and broken hands. He is also friendly. He smiles. He resists.

He _is_.

///

“Fuck you!”

Don’t they know anything else? Eames shifts, punches his mattress. It’s already impossible to get comfortable in his own bed on an ordinary day. Right now, the walls are so thin, closing in on him, and all the abuse and all the fighting washes over him, black haze over his eyes, and he wants out, he wants to find something else. This is boring – these domestic disturbances, these little shouting matches. They’ve been coming more and more frequently.

Sometimes Eames wakes up and the first thought that comes into his head when he hears the absolute silence is _They’ve finally killed each other_. And then he feels relief – a sick sort of relief that tastes like poison on his tongue, until someone snores or grunts and then he knows the truth. They’re still here.

And he can’t regret wishing them dead.

Finally, he sits up, blinking angrily in the darkness of his room. He consciously decides that all the shouting is just an annoying murmur of background noise. He consciously blocks all the repetitive insults, four-letter words looping and echoing, and he stares out the window, at the snow drifting in fat flakes. A faint covering of white and slush already on the ground.

He jumps, suddenly, at a very loud and very near crash. He slaps the wall in his fright.

And he jumps again when there is an answering _whap_ from the other side of the wall.

Eames dives back under the covers, holds himself as far away from the wall as he can and still be on his actual bed. He’s within a hair’s-breadth of falling onto the cold floor.

There’s another _whap_ , quieter this time.

And Eames doesn’t know why he suddenly thinks of Arthur, Arthur’s black eyes, the inexplicable strength in his hands. He doesn’t know why he inches back toward the wall and tentatively places a hand against it.

He doesn’t know why he’s suddenly putting everything he has into the connection with the wall – he doesn’t even know where Arthur’s room must be, somewhere in the neighbors’ apartment.

Eames touches his forehead to the wall. Sleep and a strange warmth. And that’s how he falls asleep, a curl of blankets, his back pressed to the wall.

He dreams of silence and warmth. Of someone watching over him.

///

Perhaps I should not have taken that last bag of blood.

The world is sharper, light and dark more strongly contrasted.

But the things I can’t help but hear...even I want to block them out, sometimes. Even when the sound is something inherently good and welcome.

I turn away, ignore the low laughter coming from Dominick and Mallorie’s room.

I turn away, ignore the neighbors shouting. Apartment 432.

But as I turn away I hear a _smack_. The wall next to my bed.

Focus. Who is on the other side? I put my palms flat on the wall. I listen.

Faraway, so close, someone is breathing.

I strike the wall with my palm, as hard as I can.

Whoever is on the other side of the wall gasps.

I hit the wall again. Gentler, more quietly.

The sound of breathing. A distant heartbeat, speeding, and then slowing down. Breathing, soft and deep, like someone settling into sleep.

I know where Eames is now.

I press my ear to the wall, and listen to Eames.

///

Eames finds himself in the school library the next day.

The librarian looks curiously at him when he asks for a book on codes, but she fetches him something anyway – a weathered old book in a cracked blue cover. Fading silver stamped on the front: _Military Signals._

He pages restlessly past the sections on semaphore telegraphs, flag signals – and then he stops short at the section on Morse code.

He’s tucked himself into a corner of the library. He has a view of the door, of the windows – but the carrel hides him from all other eyes.

His mouth firms and he rips the page showing the alphabet and the numbers out, as quietly as he can. Leaves the book wedged between two shelving units.

Eames feels his heart, a runaway knocking beat in his ribs, as he walks out of the library, breaks into a run out of the school and towards Yusuf’s restaurant.

No one sees him.

///

Eames is running, irregular leaps across the ground.

I _jump_ down from the window, down the sheltered side of the building.

He reaches the playground, laughing, and he sits down in a heap at the foot of the ladder next to the slide.

I compose myself and walk out to him.

“Hello, Arthur,” Eames says, quietly. He moves to one of the swings and sits down, rocks back and forth on his heels.

“Hello, Eames.”

“I got you something,” he says, after a few long moments of the wind moaning through the trees, past the windows of the buildings surrounding the playground.

“You don’t have to give me anything.”

“I have to say thank you, for saving my life.”

“You were never in danger.” And he will never know how true that is.

Just as I do not know why I will make it so.

“’S polite if friends give friends presents.” He smiles. He holds out a piece of paper.

I take it from him, carefully.

Morse code.

It takes me only a few minutes to memorize the code. I have seen several variations on it, through the long years.

Eames is blushing, a faint red line across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, when I look back up.

“Arthur?”

“Eames.”

“Where in your flat are you?”

I smile at him, then. So that was him, then, breathing.

“I’m on the other side of your wall,” I say.

That takes him aback, but only for a moment, and his smile changes again: something smaller, but happier. Light shining brightly in his eyes. “That was you,” he says, and he nods to himself. Pause, and then: “I’m glad.”

I hand him back the sheet of paper. “I know this,” I say, simply, and Eames looks at me, a little shocked, and I have to press the code back into his hands. “Keep it. I’ll send you messages, and if you have that you can receive them.”

“You must be pretty smart,” Eames says after a few moments. He is studying the code intently, as the light begins to fail.

“I just know some things,” I say.

How to fly. How to pin down a person and prevent them from struggling. The blood vessels surrounding the heart and the lungs. Poisons that will paralyze my victims, but not affect me. How to put up curtains. The things I should wear so I can blend into a crowd.

Compared to that, a language is easy. A system of dots and dashes is easy.

When Eames gets up, I reach out to him – and he takes my hand, his skin burning pleasantly against mine – and we walk into the building together.

He is smiling to himself.

I smile back when he waves outside his door.

It takes everything I have to walk, not run, back into my room. I have to stop myself from putting my ear back to the wall.

And there is a soft tapping: _T.H.A.N.K. Y.O.U._

I tap back. _G.O.O.D. N.I.G.H.T. E.A.M.E.S._

///

I open my eyes.

The message comes again.

 _H.E.L.P. M.E._

And then, silence. A door being closed.

The first thing I do is knock, loudly, on the door to Dominick and Mallorie’s room. They’re wide awake and looking at me with concern.

“Arthur – situation report,” Dominick says. He’s in blue flannel and old denim. His face is the face of a battlefield surgeon, or perhaps the Head of Cardiovascular Surgery. That was his position at his former hospital, and he is well on his way towards it at the new one.

Mallorie simply rushes past us and into the kitchen, pulling food and drinks out of the refrigerator.

“Domestic disturbance, as you will no doubt have noticed,” I say, dryly. “And Eames is tapping for help.”

“Got it. We can’t sleep for all the yelling next door; I can’t imagine how Eames takes it. Now, shoo – I’ll prep here, you go and get him out of there.”

“All right.” I _think_ myself a little taller, a little older, a little more imposing.

“Arthur, _cher_ ,” Mallorie says, and she throws a suit jacket to me. It’s one of hers. Scent of ocean and white flower in the collar, satin lining. I do up all the buttons and walk out the door.

Apartment 432. This close, I can hear the entire conversation – or perhaps that’s not the right word. I can hear two raised voices: one is female, shrill and throaty and repeating the same insults over and over again; the other is male, broken by years of smoking and other vices.

I listen intently for the third voice: Eames. He’s calm, but he’s also unhappy, as well he should be in his situation. “Look, all I want is some quiet; I’m doing homework, and I can’t do it if you’re working toward another ASBO!”

“Who _cares_ about ASBOs?” is the response, from the woman, and I pick that moment to knock on the door.

Or perhaps I have not knocked on it. I slam my fist into it, once.

The wood cracks. I peer at the door, at the fine spiderweb of lines, and I’m close enough to hear both a shocked whisper of a curse, and a darkly amused chuckle.

I laugh, and raise my fist again, and hit the door for the second time.

This time the splinters fall with a quiet patter around my shoes.

“What the _fuck_ are you doing _breaking our door_ – ” The door opens. A tall man. His enormous belly precedes him. Traces of muscle on his upper arms, broad shoulders, pseudo-tribal tattoos scrawled into his skin. His eyes are both bloodshot and watery. Sick-stale stench around him, sweat and intoxicants and unwashed clothes.

I smile at him. It is not a friendly smile. “Looking for Stuart, please.”

“I said don’t call me that,” Eames says as he walks up to me. His eyes widen slightly at me, but that is all.

I reach out to him. His fist meets my hand, soft smack of greeting.

“Hi, Arthur,” he says.

“Hello, Eames. Come along.”

“Right, don’t wait up,” he says to them. The woman has orange-hued hair and her mouth is rounded in a perfect, shocked O. “Gonna fuck off out of here if you don’t mind.”

Eames slams the door in their faces, and smiles at me.

This is getting to be all too familiar.

There is blood all over his teeth.

“Come on,” I say. “Dominick and Mallorie are worried about you, and you need to have him look at your face.”

“And you?” Eames asks.

“Excuse me?”

“You worried about me, too? Or did you have another reason for pretty much bashing the fucking front door in?”

I chuckle, quietly, and put my hand on his shoulder – and Eames immediately covers my hand with his.

His hand is warm, and so are his eyes, when he smiles at me.

///

“Evening,” Eames says, quietly, when he walks into the kitchen of Apartment 434. “Sorry to be a bother.”

Mallorie sighs and pours the steaming tea into a tall glass. Metal spoon to stir, and then a handful of ice cubes.

Dominick squints, directs him into a chair, positions him under the kitchen light. “All right, what happened to you?”

Eames recounts the story in short phrases. “Studying. Report due in two days. _He_ got home. Still high on whatever. Tried to fuck _her_ and she fought him off. They fought. I yelled at them to shut up. He hit me, and she tried to kick me.” He motions to his own groin. “Got away from her, but not from him.”

“Shall we call the police?” Mallorie asks. She puts the full glass down on the table, within easy arm’s reach.

“No,” Eames says, and at the same time he hears both Dominick and Arthur say “Yes.”

He watches her, and the skeptical expression she gives the other two, and the gentle eyes that she turns back to him. “I will take your word for it, _mon cher_ Eames, but I will do so with protest, mm? The ASBO is just English nonsense. They should be locked up and the keys thrown away. There is nothing _right_ in domestic abuse.”

“Mal’s right.” And there are Dominick’s hands, skilled and careful, coaxing Eames’s mouth open and swabbing out the blood. He prods gently at his teeth. “Well, no wiggles, but see a dentist as soon as you can. And wash your mouth out with this.”

Mallorie smiles at him as he steps past her to the sink.

The mouthwash tastes like the sidewalk outside a pub, but Eames swishes it around without protest.

He doesn’t see Arthur staring at him as he spits.

///

Once Eames is drinking his iced tea I slip away and _change_ back. Blood. I have to stop myself from thinking about him, from seeing him and his blood all the time.

I...am so lonely.

I put Mallorie’s suit jacket back in the hall closet before returning to the kitchen.

Dominick is telling the story of how he and Mallorie met. I’ve heard this story many times, but it still makes them both laugh.

I take them all in as they sit and talk quietly. Eames’s laugh bounces richly around the apartment. Sound of life and genuine amusement. Warm, and I don’t know why I chose that adjective. I have not really been warm for so long. But he feels like a crackling fire, like a distant light.

In the end, it is Mallorie who notices me there, and she shoots a look at Dominick – and he grins and he says, “Well, g’night, Eames. I’ve got an early shift at the hospital tomorrow, so I won’t be there to point you to the dentist, but make sure you go, okay?”

“Okay,” Eames says, and then Mallorie is pulling him to his feet, is laying swift kisses across his cheeks, and he blushes and smiles and mutters “Good night” after her.

“Arthur?” she says.

“Yes?” I say.

“You look after him for us.”

I’m looking at Eames when I answer. “I will, Mallorie.”

And she presses a kiss to my cheek, as well, before she steps into their room and closes the door. Click of the lock sliding home.

“You look better, now. More like yourself. That was a nice trick, back at my flat.” Eames says. He stills for a moment, goes back to playing with the spoon in his glass of tea. “They didn’t say anything about me staying here.”

“They did not need to,” I tell him. “You are welcome here, whenever you need a quiet place to stay.”

He looks astonished, and suddenly angry. “I don’t want pity, not from you or them or anyone.”

“Who said anything about pity,” I say.

That silences him.

I bring him beddings, but he shakes his head, and he says, quietly, “Can I see your room?”

“I don’t have much in there,” I say, and I take his hand – and he grips mine, warmly – and lead him in. “Come in, Eames.”

At least the cooler is hidden under my bed.

That last change soon takes its toll on me, and now it is all I can do to keep my eyes open.

I sit down carefully on the floor. “Small place,” Eames says.

I answer him and my voice comes out slowly, heavily. “I do not need much room.”

He’s kneeling next to me, suddenly, and his eyes are concerned. “Are you all right?”

“No,” I tell him. “I’m hungry.”

“Then why didn’t you eat, or drink – ”

“I don’t eat _normal_ food, Eames.”

“What?”

“If you hate me after seeing this, I will understand. Believe me.” I reach for the cooler. It’s mostly empty now, but even the act of pulling it out from under the bed is exhausting.

He is silent, even as I take a bag of O blood – Dominick’s – and slit it open, drink it down. I lick every drop of blood from my lips.

When I finish, I can’t meet his eyes.

“Arthur.”

“Eames.”

“Is this some kind of ritual, or – ”

“I have to drink blood to survive, Eames. There is a name for those who are like me.” I look up at him, but I’m still not looking in his eyes.

“I don’t care,” Eames suddenly says after a long silence. “I don’t give a flying fuck.”

“What?”

“I. Don’t. Care. You’re Arthur, you’re my friend.” Pause. “ _Are_ we friends?”

“I have not had any friends for a hundred years now, Eames. But I would like to consider you one.”

He grabs me, then, and I tense, but here are his hands meeting on my back, his arms wrapped around my shoulders. “I don’t normally have friends, but yes, that’s what we are, _that’s who we are_ ,” Eames is saying.

The world is sharpening around me as the blood runs through my veins. Eames smells like life, like the winter sun and sharp curry, like schoolrooms and the wooden squeaking floors of gymnasiums. His warmth seeps through me, heedless of the cold outside. Snow-shadows falling past the window, softly drifting over his wide-awake eyes.

I pull him to me, breathe him in, and I hold him in place when he puts his head on my shoulder. Heat. Skin. Life, beating beneath the surface.

“Eames,” I whisper, and I let myself go, let myself miss everything that I’ve left behind.

///

Eames tells Arthur all his secrets, and he never stops to wonder how he could trust the other boy so much. All he knows is that here is Arthur who has saved him, again and again, and he can’t think of a way to repay him, and he gives him all his heart with a smile.

They’re sitting on the rooftop and Eames suddenly says, “I don’t know why I’m not afraid of you, Arthur.” Pause. “Should I be?”

Eames watches his own breath come out in hot little clouds, and he looks over at Arthur, who is not breathing. No mist hangs around him.

“Eames.”

“Arthur.”

“I...when my kind makes promises, Eames, we must keep those promises or we will die. We’ll be eaten up by our broken vows; it’ll be like fire to us, and we cannot survive in the presence of fire.

“I can’t promise you that I will never do anything that will frighten you. I’m something different; I’m _other_ – I may scare you with my next change. But I can promise you that whatever I do, whatever I change into, will be for you. Because you need me to, or because I must, for you.”

Eames looks away, looks down, squeezes his eyes shut. He’s been thinking about Arthur a lot. _Vampires._ But nothing so boring as fangs and a hypnotic gaze, though if he looks a little closely he does see how Arthur’s teeth are sharp and gleaming – and his eyes, so old and so full of emotion, compelling Eames to look at him.

He steels himself and asks: “How did you...how were you...am I using the right word, if I say _turned_?”

Arthur looks over. Ghost of a smile, a faint strange light in his eyes. “What do you want to know?”

And Eames can’t help but say, “Everything.”

Arthur nods. “All right. Be me for a while,” he says, and then he’s pulling Eames close, and he’s –

 _He’s kissing me._

///

I close my eyes, fall into Eames. I show him my memories: the woman and her sister, the bag of money in my mother’s hands, my sisters crying. The woman who turned me, her smile full of hatred. The years of plenty and the years of hunger, going from hunting at leisure to gnawing on rats to survive.

The sharp flash of teeth in my neck, the greedy sucking sounds, the coppery-dust scent of faded blood being dripped into my mouth. Wild need and long, long years of sleep.

I show him Dominick and Mallorie, finding me starving on the streets. Throwing up everything they tried to feed me, my horror when they found out my secret. Watching the two of them go through the bloodletting procedures over and over again, the bags neatly labeled O and B, and stacked in the cooler.

“Stop, stop,” Eames whispers, and I let him go. The muscles in his shoulders, bunching as he moved and reacted. Wide, shocked eyes.

I look away.

Eames gasps for several minutes, like he’s been running a race.

And then he’s pulling me back to him, up against his broad chest, and he’s muttering into the skin beneath my ear: “I don’t care, I still don’t care. We’re _friends_. Nothing will change that. Nothing.”

His hands are crossed over my chest. I put my hands over his. “I won’t leave you, Eames.”

One more promise to keep.

///

It’s a cool, windy summer this year, and the girl with the scarf is reading a battered _Harry Potter_ paperback when Eames goes into the off-licence for a drink. She’s wearing her usual oversized clothes, but the scarf seems new, a bright splash of red and yellow.

On impulse, he buys two orange juices, and offers her one.

He’s expecting her to be suspicious – but she lights up at him, and she pushes the scarf down from where it’s wrapped around her mouth to reveal a bright smile.

“Hi,” Eames says.

The girl smiles some more, waves at him.

“Good book?”

She shrugs. Points to the cover, to Harry, and gives Eames a thumbs-up.

“I don’t like him much myself – I like Ron better,” Eames offers.

She laughs, then, her shoulders shaking silently. Playfully pats his shoulder. After a moment, she offers him money, to pay for her juice.

“My treat,” Eames says. “Last day of term and all that.”

Her smile changes, becomes more admiring, and she reaches for his hands and clasps them tightly. Her hands are chapped, small and cold and white.

At school he sits impatiently through all the classes except Saito’s. The teacher is leaving, going back to Japan, and he has some questions for him.

“So,” Saito says, after Eames’s class. “Vampires. _Kyuuketsuki._ What do you wish to know about them?”

“I’m just hoping,” Eames mutters, grinning, “that Japanese ones aren’t sparkly or wimpy or whatever.”

Saito allows himself a small, rusty chuckle. “Ah, yes, those. I believe your classmates were quite disappointed that I did not assign them those books to read.”

“Wouldn’t have done if you had.”

“I would have expected no less from you, Mister Eames. Now. To answer your question. Despite the presence of an equivalent noun, we do not truly believe in them, and we have borrowed the Western characteristics for our horror movie characters. You might be more interested in the idea of the _yurei_.”

“ _Yurei_?”

“Ghosts. Some of them are benevolent, but many more are evil, only wishing for the destruction of humans.”

“Like Sadako?”

“And the one who inspired her: Oiwa. Even now, when people wish to tell her story, they must visit her supposed grave and ask for her permission, or she will haunt them mercilessly.”

Eames thinks about Arthur, about his pale skin and his dark hair. His suits, and his neat appearance. The dent in the front door of Apartment 432. Arthur’s mouth, dark red after drinking blood.

His eyes. In the dark, they change, and his pupils become cat-like slits. The guilt and the pleasure in his face when Dominick and Mal refill the cooler.

He comes to Eames’s room at night, now. The two of them squashed together on the bed, Arthur curled around Eames, his arms wrapped around Eames’s torso. His skin, warming slowly; his voice, quiet and grave, murmuring out tales of his long years of un-life. Sleep, and security, the best nights he’s had for years.

Saito levels a serious look at him. “It may well be a long time before we see each other again. A warning: you must face your enemies again and again, and whatever you wish to do, Mister Eames, I hope you will take the time to think long and hard about the consequences.”

Eames nods, thinking of the terrible burning loneliness in Arthur’s eyes, and he solemnly shakes Saito’s hand when it’s time for him to go.

“ _Sayonara_ , Mister Eames,” he hears Saito say as he walks out the door.

He nods to himself, quietly grateful, and he remembers what that word means.

///

The days grow inexorably longer, and I divide my time between my room and Eames’s.

It’s nice to know that hundreds of years can be a little useful: I reinforce the locks, reposition the chairs in the room so there is one within easy reach of the door.

I am sitting in the shade of his window, looking out at the afternoon, when someone calls my name.

I wince and steel myself. Mallorie is sitting on my window sill.

“Hello, Arthur. I guessed you would be in Eames’s room, so, _here_ ,” and she throws an armful of billowing white and cream over to me. “I finally managed to get all the mildew smells out of these old sheets. Make up Eames’s bed for me, please?”

“ _Certainement_ ,” I say, and smile through the pain, and do as instructed.

I’ve been alive so long, and sunlight still hurts, but only a little, and I can move through the pain.

When I finish Mallorie is still basking in the sun, but she smiles at me when I look out at her. “I’m going out to the library; do you want me to get you anything?”

“I am well, thank you,” I say. “Please look after yourself – and have fun.”

“ _Mais_ , I intend to,” she laughs. “And then I will come home in time to make Dominick’s dinner. I will see you at the table, will I not?”

“I will be there,” I say.

But the sun is gone by the time she closes the front door behind her.

From atop the building I watch her go, and as soon as the sun is a distant memory below the horizon, I give in to the impulse, and I pursue her, silently, over the rooftops and the great old trees.

When she picks up a tail I feel my body _change_ , and I let the teeth and the claws out. I feel sorry for my suit for only a short moment.

///

Eames is reading _Dracula_ for the third time when a familiar voice rings out on the library steps. “Hello, _mon cher_ Eames!”

“Mallorie,” he says, and he looks up and his eyes widen and he grabs the hand she’s holding out to him, spins her around so he’s standing in front of her.

“What is this – _no, Eames, don’t do it,_ ” she gasps.

Eames grits his teeth, whips out his butterfly knife.

He watches the two boys close in on them, sluggish, like they’re swimming through a slow muck. Robert’s eyes are alight with hate, the blank grin frozen in place. Maurice swaggers and brandishes a heavy pair of brass knuckles.

Their usual hangers-on are nowhere in sight – but Eames notices that the library steps are empty, too.

“Mallorie,” he whispers, and he squeezes her hand, gently, “as soon as I start fighting, start running. There’s a shortcut you can take to the hospital, to Dominick. Stay with him.”

“And you?”

He pastes a false smile on his face. “I’ll be fine.”

“ _Non_ ,” she says, not fooled a bit. “No, you won’t.”

“I won’t, okay,” Eames says easily. “But I’m not interested in seeing you hurt, and I’m pretty sure Dominick would beat me up if I didn’t protect you. So let me do my job here, and you can do yours later.”

“I will call for help, Eames, I promise, and I will send Arthur to you as soon as I can.”

“Thank you,” Eames says.

And when Robert lunges for him, Eames is ready, flicking out his butterfly with practiced speed, and he gets one good hit in and Robert goes down, and then Maurice is swinging at him....

///

I close my hand around the white-haired boy’s wrist and _fling_ him, and he lands with a faraway thump. The other boy’s hands I crush in mine, and I rake my claws down over his face before discarding him.

Mallorie is cowering in the library’s door, hand clenched white-knuckled around her mobile phone, and Eames is down, badly wounded. Blood from a dark gash in his neck, very near his aorta. His eyes fluttering behind closed eyelids.

“Dominick,” I rasp at her.

“On his way,” she says. “I saw everything, Arthur – they were intending to _kill_ him....”

“He went down fighting – I only wish I had come sooner, or that I had prevented you from leaving at all,” I say. I lift Eames, now, and I lay him out at Mallorie’s feet. She is already tearing strips from her skirt.

“Dominick must give him first aid before I can move him further,” I say, and just then a large hand descends on my shoulder – I snarl, but Dominick merely looks at me, and I let him go, to look at Eames.

“Concussed,” he says as he gently thumbs open Eames’s eyes. “And I need to move him, either to the hospital or – ”

“ _No_ ,” I say. “Take him home.”

“That’s up to you,” he says, calmly, before he turns to his wife. “You all right?”

“You must save him, Dom,” Mallorie says. “This happened while he was protecting me.”

“I will.” And Dominick looks at me. “Take him home, Arthur. We will follow. I need to get supplies.”

 _Wings_ , and I am in the air, flying as fast as I can.

///

He remembers knocking Robert out with the first punch he threw – but not before the little bastard had slashed him up, trying to kill him, trying to get to Mallorie.

He remembers dodging Maurice, tripping him up and kicking him viciously in the ribs.

He remembers Mallorie, growling angrily from somewhere behind him, as though she were pissed off at Dominick.

And he remembers, like a faraway story, like a distant memory: a familiar shadow overhead, and a long, feral cry.

He feels weak, now, and cold. The wind rushes loudly in his ears and there is a distant beat, he’s moving quickly although he’s not moving at all.

Eames opens his eyes and he can’t focus, the world is grey and sluggish around him – but he sees a brief flash of Arthur’s face, the eyebrows drawn together in a straight line.

He passes out while he’s still trying to smile.

///

Dominick looks ashen when he emerges, once again, from my room.

“He’s fading fast.”

Mallorie begins to cry.

“Is he conscious,” I ask.

“Just barely.” And he spears me with a serious look on his face. “Arthur, if you do that....”

“I will leave, with him. You need not ask.”

“No, Arthur, stay,” Mallorie says as she dashes the tears from her eyes. “That won’t be necessary. We will look after you both.”

“Thank you, but no. I will not uproot the two of you again. And you must focus on the work of creating your family.”

“I would not have any objections to the two of you staying in my home, Arthur, even alongside our children, if we were to have them,” Dominick says.

I clasp his shoulder and shake my head. “For the last time: no. I will turn him tonight, or I will kill him if that is his wish. Thank you, for all your efforts.”

“You’ve been like a son to us both, Arthur,” he says. “Thanks, for protecting Mal, and for everything.”

Mallorie smiles tremulously and reaches out a hand – I clasp hers in mine, for one long moment, and then I pass her back to Dominick. “Goodbye.”

Inside the room, Eames breathes, but shallowly; I touch his skin. He is growing colder by the moment.

“Eames,” I say softly. “Stuart Eames.”

He is frowning, and his eyes cannot seem to focus – but he looks at me.

“Would you want to...become like me?”

His hand moves, slowly, to take mine. His mouth, trying to form a word. _Yes._

“Do you know what you are getting yourself into?”

 _Please._

I close my eyes. I am lonely, but to be like me is to be condemned....

Eames’s hand squeezes mine, weakly, and then he closes his eyes and stops breathing.

No, no, no!

And I lean over and tear the bandage away from his neck, sink my teeth into his skin.

And Eames fights me. He thrashes weakly, he moans, and it’s child’s play to hold him down.

I _change_ one of my fingers into a sharp claw, draw it quickly across my own wrist. My blood and his, welling up redly, and I drip it into his mouth.

Eames suddenly seizes my hand with both of his and begins to feed, avidly, hungrily.

I reach for the cooler with my other hand.

Eames goes through three bags of blood before he’s done – before he opens his eyes and looks at me.

Eyes like mine – slitted, dark – and the wound on his neck has completely healed. A faint line of scarring.

His teeth glitter in the faint light, all sharp edges.

“Think of _change_ ,” I tell him. “Your teeth will go back to normal.”

He does, and they do, and finally Eames is smiling shyly at me. “I remember everything.”

I nod at him. “That is a common side effect.”

“You killed them?”

I think, and all I remember is throwing the Fischers away. “I don’t remember. Truly.”

“I want to know for sure. For Mallorie.”

I smile at him, offer him my hand. “Then it shall be the last thing we do, here, and then we must go. We cannot stay with them, now.”

“I know,” Eames says.

I teach him to use his wings, and we vanish, into the night.

I will have to be patient, and gentle, when teaching him.

But for the first time in a long while, I feel like I can face the long nights ahead.

 **the end - and the beginning**


End file.
